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Posted by speckx 1 hour ago

Quick impressions: A week of using Codex more than Claude(allaboutcoding.ghinda.com)
49 points | 55 comments
217 52 minutes ago|
while everyone is somehow still stuck on and fascinated by claude, heres your quick update on the sota of coding models and harnesses mid august 2026

codex is good, both cli and desktop app, you get lots of usage on any plan. sol is good! and gets the job done, write or dictate a very long and thoughtful prompt, and leave sol xhigh or max fast working on it for an hour or so

omp is an amazing harness, any feature claude code or codex is adding has likely already been here for a couple months. good harness which im suggesting to all my developer friends, but for everyone else codex is the better option due to its simplicity and being the plug and play option

claude is decent, but not great. all models are somehow getting restrictive. you get basically unlimited opus on max plans, fable is good but slow and the random guardrails suck soo much which is why i havent used it once in weeks now.

gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it, including even me

kimi k3 - great for frontend, one of the few models thats willing to commit crimes for you AND has the intelligence to have a chance at actually succeeding;

ds pro and flash are fast but not something id actually use for important things, unlike sol, fable and maybe 3.7 here and there

glm 5.3 i haven't tested yet

honorable mention to local models which are actually getting good now! 5090s will continue to get more and more expensive in the coming months. sadly.

theres way way more than claude in this world and its taking people surprisingly long to figure that out. maybe its for the best!

ibramGaunt 25 minutes ago||
My token usage on Claude models has dropped by 83% over the last month - I'm pretty much only using it for quick one off questions or reading papers. it feels impossible for me to get Opus models to stop entering into cyclic loops, and my work is too security adjacent for Fable.

Codex has been an excellent workhorse - doesn't feel like I have to dance around the guardrails, doesn't lose _everything_ when it compacts, and doesn't litter the workspace with a million and one planning to plan files.

nateb2022 6 minutes ago|||
> ds pro and flash are fast but not something id actually use for important things, unlike sol, fable and maybe 3.7 here and there

As someone who's used Gemini 3.7 Flash (Google sub mostly for the storage) and DS4 Flash a lot (~6B tokens), I'd actually place DS4 Flash (even pre-0713) above Gemini 3.7 Flash. Gemini has a tendency to leave some things unimplemented; perhaps it's agy which frankly leaves a bit to be desired as a harness.

Although I will praise DS4 Flash any day, it no longer makes sense for me after the price increase (GPT 5.6 Luna is a much better price point) and I have completely migrated my high volume workflows to Muse Spark 1.2 Contributor (which I find to perform better than DS4 Flash 0713, happily).

trjordan 31 minutes ago|||
Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime. Fast and accurate.

And it can communicate, unlike the gobbledygook that comes out of Claude.

ceejayoz 26 minutes ago|||
> Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime.

Not yet. Don't give the guy ideas.

king_crimson 26 minutes ago|||
Been working a lot recently with Grok 4.6 for implementation and gpt 5.6 sol for review. Worked really good so far.
tecoholic 4 minutes ago|||
> gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it

Is this Gemini 3.7 Flash by any chance? Then - No. Not sleeping on it. It’s just not good.

I had a Python package build fail this week due to an unpinned dependency. Gave it to Gemini spent 5-7mins before I noticed it going off in some tangent. Reran with Claude Opus 4.8 - fixed in under a minute.

I know anecdata of one. But something like this has happened every time I test a new model from Google.

sejje 30 minutes ago|||
I think harness/model pairs matter more than your analysis lets on.

I've had great luck with the ds flash v4, paired with prime-agent for the harness--I like the results a lot. And you get to see thinking tokens.

I haven't liked the model as much in opencode.

Sol & luna have been great everywhere. sol plans, luna builds.

xianshou 33 minutes ago|||
the future is here and one should be thankful for its slightly uneven distribution. otherwise we would hardly have anything left about which to develop strong opinions!
rc1 12 minutes ago||
[dead]
agentdev001 4 minutes ago||
Im trying to do my part in the world here.

This post needs an edit. Author is not comparing "Codex" and "Claude". They are comparing Codex TUI/CLI with (presumably) gpt-5.6-sol, against Claude Code TUI/CLI with (presumably) Claude-Opus-5.

Ctrl + f > [5.6, sol, sonnet, opus or fable] yields no results.

"Claude" is a product family, which includes Models, and Harnesses (and probably more). "Claude code" covers both the Claude Code TUI, and CC in the Claude desktop app.

"Codex" is the same, and could refer to the Codex TUI, or Codex in the ChatGPT (formerly codex) desktop app. (And well, historically, gpt-5.*-codex.)

Hearing "Yea Claude is great for coding" takes an hour off my life.

Something something "Honey why don't you finish up with your Nintendo and come to dinner?"

mewse-hn 49 minutes ago||
I only have the $20 claude subscription. Last weekend I was doing a fairly heavy task (porting quake to raspberry pi native GLES 1.0) and ran out of claude usage twice, then hooked in with Luna in OpenCode and finished everything off for like $0.40 in tokens, which was impressive.

With Opus 5.0 being kinda crappy vs 4.8, I think Anthropic is in trouble.

smith7018 26 minutes ago||
On the flip side, I've been using Fable to statically recompile a game binary from a system that's never been emulated to modern C++ while also keeping the code clean, maintainable, and portable and it's been a dream. I'm in awe of how fast Fable is able to bring a 20 year old game that's largely been lost to the sands of time to SDL3. It finished the recomp in about 3 hours. The next day has been fully rewriting the functions to remove old hardware-specific quirks and then rewriting large swaths into multiple classes, subsystems, building tests, etc. Tomorrow I'm going to add mod support and then experiment with a random platform like making a Switch build of the game.

It's expensive but it's doing in hours what no one's done in 2 decades.

kromokromo 7 minutes ago||
Model performance is very much subjective to what you’re using it for. I’m a PM and doing mostly knowledge work, and I’ve been really happy with Opus 5 as my daily driver with very good results, perhaps my favorite anthropic model so far. I do a lot of front-end coding with it too. I prefer it over the openAI models, been switching frequently. Kimi K3 is great too.
Kovah 35 minutes ago||
> It felt to me that Codex created a much simpler solution in terms of code architecture than Claude.

Wow, I made exactly the opposite experience. Codex loves to make things as complicated as possible, even ignoring instructions and predefined skills. Claude behaves way more pragmatic. Maybe depends on the type of work one does, or even which programming languages/frameworks are used?

smusamashah 33 minutes ago|
I have the same experience. I have passed Codex's code over to Claude (Sonnet mostly) to simplify it and it did a so much better job. Codex couldn't comprehend a simpler solution no matter what.
corytheboyd 55 minutes ago||
I’m sure it depends on the type of work, but for mine, Codex is much more helpful. Honestly, it mostly comes down to it being significantly faster, probably because as many have said, it seems tuned to not spit out word vomit, both in its chat interactions, and its code (Claude is obsessed with massive comment blocks that are basically guaranteed to become dead context noise if you ever use it to iterate on code).

I mostly do very obsessive, tightly scoped, carefully thought out small changes on a fairly boring stack, one interaction at a time, verifying functionality and code. I know what I am doing, but I also know what I don’t like doing (the same exact set of things I’ve already done a dozen times in my career)

stillpointlab 23 minutes ago||
> Codex feels more like a version of Data from Star Trek

Great analogy for some reason. At fist I felt Codex Sol was a bit more cold. But now that I've worked with it for several weeks it has grown on me, even shown some personality. I appreciate that it is a bit more business-like, Fable is a bit too friendly sometimes when it ought to be focused on work. Codex can be a bit more nit-picky.

I agree with most of his other observations. I've already started to bin tasks based on which model I feel is best suited. In general, for well scoped and straight ahead tasks where banging out code is what I want I reach for Codex. For less specced tasks where I need a broader view and want the model to fill in more details I reach for Fable.

Both are great and they make a good team together.

piazz 22 minutes ago||
Summer 2026 meta (well, mine):

Sol is for routine work, Opus for frontend/design, and Fable for more complex / ambiguous / architecture work. Fable works extremely well to drive Sol as a subagent.

Fable is the only one you can actually trust to not look at the code, but Sol is somehow still more pleasant to work with, especially in fast mode. Opus is the enemy, and it will make you insane if you talk to it for too long.

AnodicElegy 9 minutes ago||
"How this article was written I wrote this article and used Grammarly to proofread and fix it."

What a brave new world we're in, where this is necessary. Regardless, it's appreciated. Although, I have the feeling that those using an LLM to do most of their writing will be less likely to include such a disclaimer.

ukuina 1 hour ago||
Which models? It is not useful to compare harnesses without this information.
NyxWulf 28 minutes ago|
Which models, and at what effort level?
tunesmith 36 minutes ago|
For me, codex $100 mo/plan and a claude teams account at work (mostly sonnet, some opus), Claude basically feels about as effective as Codex did 4-5 months ago pre-5.6. Claude still has weird patterns of being confident in one answer while another chat with the same model is confident in another answer, where one answer is clearly wrong. Missed details, over-engineering in places, while still overall helpful and effective. Codex, however, just feels freaking rock solid on Sol high. I literally have zero complaints.
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